Fly Manby Alasdair McPherson

Genre:MemoirSwearwords: None.Description:Air travel before easyJet. Long before easyJet._____________________________________________________________________I was sitting, killing time, in the departure lounge at
Manchester Airport. I know you should never explain, never complain but to be
checked in at seven in the morning for a flight at nine can only be a marketing
ploy.

It was the start of a holiday with my daughter and it had all the excitement of a visit to a shopping mall with her. The only difference was that I was sitting with an over-priced coffee tutting into myself at the guys – and dolls – beasting into pints of lager. I mean, I know you’re on holiday, but pints at seven in the morning? In my day we discreetly sipped brandy from a flask. Apart from one short stretch of window looking out on silent, stationery aircraft I could have been waiting for her to window shop in the Trafford Centre, Buchanan Street or Meadowhall. They even have the same shops and, at a cursory glance, pretty much the same prices even although they trumpet ‘Duty Free’ at every turn. The only excitement in the next hour was when our flight made it onto the top departure board. I had to sit down with another coffee for ten minutes while my heartbeat returned to normal! Eventually we got aboard a crowded plane, with the cabin crew almost as scruffy as the passengers, to find ourselves locked into a mobile shop for the next four hours. In fact, I am surprised that Tesco have not yet bought an airline. When I started jetting about some fifty years ago the whole experience was several notches up the social scale. We travelled in suits with ties and it never crossed our minds to explode a bomb. Nowadays most passengers are unshaved, wear unwashed Matalan t-shirts and jeans and look like terrorists or football supporters. We looked like gentlemen and were treated as such. On stop-overs BOAC (now British Airways) would supply me with towels and a pack containing soap, razor and toothbrush so I could shower while I waited for my connecting flight. On board, your ticket entitled you to snacks and soft drinks – even American airlines gave you a small pack of mini-pretzels! The cabin crew had to calm us down in the old days, of course, because we were all conscious that flying was an unnatural activity for human beings. Everyone, especially those who had never flown, had a theory about the best place to sit in the event of an accident; the consensus was that the tail was best on overland flights but the wing exit doors were preferable for ditching in the ocean. Airlines were never very sympathetic to passengers who were scared of flying: the first in-flight movie, shown in 1925, was ‘The Lost World’ about a fairly major travel glitch. You could get a discussion going in any pub in those days by asking people what they would do in the minute or so between recognising that a crash was inevitable and the impact. Someone with a sweep second hand on his watch would measure out a minute while the rest of us put together a collection of last thoughts. After a drink or several, ribald remarks centring on last flings with the gorgeous stewardesses (as we called them in our non-pc fashion) would end in a fight when someone suggested that his mate would never last a full minute in the lists of lust. Nowadays the flight attendants of the female persuasion look like your granny; it is hard to imagine working up a pash for them even in extremis! Fewer people flew fifty years ago so you could often stretch out across three seats and have a nap. One time on a flight to New York I was wakened when a fellow passenger bumped into me. He apologised and we settled into a conversation After a very few minutes I had him tagged as an example of that type that has done it all and seen beyond it – a bigger bum than two arses, as you might say. He reached his peroration with a tale of drinking champagne with Dora Bryan in her dressing room after a performance of ‘Hello Dolly’ the previous evening. I was just letting ‘Aye, that will be right’ slip from my thoughts to my expression when he got out his camera case and produced photographic proof of his claims. He forgave me and even took a photograph of me on his Polaroid camera that I put in my wallet. We parted in the arrivals hall, I to travel on to Norman, Oklahoma and him to a hotel in New York and, no doubt, champagne suppers with the stars of Broadway. I was replacing Frank as the British contribution to the spring programme at the National Severe Storms Laboratory. It was well into the thunderstorm season and we were treated to a spectacular display by a line of storms as we approached Tulsa. It was like flying across the face of an open furnace. We were under the anvil of the nimbus clouds and the nearly continuous lightning was painting the cloud above us fiery red. Dante would have loved it. It was rough too. I was seated at the tail (where else, on an overland flight?) and I was several times lifted from my seat to be suspended by my lap belt for ten or fifteen seconds at a time. We landed at Oklahoma City an hour late and scared witless. I had been travelling for twenty-four hours at that stage and thought that all I wanted was sleep. Frank met me at the airport and convinced me that I was too excited to sleep and that what I needed was a party where I could have a drink and unwind. He said it would minimise jet lag. ‘Trust me!’ he said. He took me to the party where I was propped against a wall with a glass that was constantly full despite my best efforts to empty it. I do not remember where the party was being held but I know that the hostess was an artist who made mosaics out of egg shells. She was tall, of a certain age and, at about three in the morning when I was getting my second wind, I got chatting to her. For some reason, lost in the mists of alcohol, I showed her the Polaroid of me on the transatlantic flight. She declared that it made me look just like her son who was in Alaska. So she phoned him to tell him that she was at that very moment flirting with his doppelganger. He was out fighting a forest fire, whether as his job or a bizarre hobby I did not establish, and was unavailable. She became worried and weepy so I tried to comfort her but we were both too drunk for anything to come of it, I am almost sure. Frank eventually took me back to the hotel and put me in a room where I slept the clock round waking up with no jet lag but a class ‘A’ hangover. What woke me was the hotel manager who wanted to know who I was and why I was squatting in his hotel room. It turned out that the night clerk had forgotten to leave a note for the day man about the arrangement he had made with Frank. A similar thing happened to me in the British Embassy in Washington some years later where I shaved and showered at gun-point. I was on my way home from California and I had stopped in Washington to brief the Scientific Adviser. Since I was due to land at one in the morning he suggested that I come straight to the embassy to sleep in a bed in the first aid suite. They were expecting me when I rolled up in Massachusetts Avenue and I was soon tucked up in a hard but very welcome bed. Next morning I woke up with a large security guard holding an enormous cannon pointed pretty close to my head. The night staff had forgotten to leave any word of my presence and Goldilocks, the duty nurse, got a shock when she came on duty to find daddy bear sleeping in her bed. The guard was understanding enough to put his gun back in its holster although I noticed that he did not button the flap! We chatted amicably while I cleaned and dressed and were the best of buddies by the time the Scientific Adviser claimed me. I flew out later from Dulles airport where they had telescopic lounges to carry passengers. You were picked up at first floor level from the terminal and the height was adjusted as you crossed the tarmac so you stepped off onto the aircraft at cabin floor level. Nowadays all airports seem to be the same with fingerposts at the departure gates a half-marathon distance from the departure lounge. In the days before even I flew airlines tried much harder because they were in competition with luxury liners. Imperial Airways (that became BOAC) had Short Brother’s Empire class seaplanes all with names beginning in ‘C’. Caledonia was an early one with Clyde joining the fleet in 1930. These planes had two decks, sleeping berths, a promenade saloon and a smoking room. Of course, in many parts of the world you had to get aboard from a wee oary boat and you took a long time to get not very far, but you did it in style! Perhaps the next big advance in aviation should be a return to unashamed extravagance. Check-in would be in Claridge’s lounge where you would be seen by the right people. Then a limo would whisk you straight to the plane where you would be shown to your luxury state room. Public rooms would have picture windows (actually flat screen TV fed by cameras mounted outside the hull), and comfortable seating with full media access. The dining room would be under the eagle-eyed supervision of a chef with an international reputation. At your destination immigration and customs officers would come aboard and grovel to you for a few minutes before your limo picked you up at the aircraft steps. ‘Posh Airways’, as I call it, would, I believe, prove irresistible to sensitive celebrities who at present suffer agonies in transit.

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About the Author

Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned two novels and is now trying his hand at short stories.